Enough Rope

915 Pages·2002·2.99 MB·English

by  Lawrence Block

7977.FM REV TOC 7/15/02 2:31 PM Page iii
E n o u g h
R pe
c o l l e c t e d s t o r i e s
7977.FM REV TOC 7/15/02 2:31 PM Page iv
This is for Marty Greenberg
and the Green Bay Packagers
7977.FM REV TOC 7/16/02 1:41 PM Page v
Contents
PerfectBound E-book Exclusive Extra: Keller By a Nose
Introduction
Short Stories
A Bad Night for Burglars, 3
A Blow for Freedom, 8
A Little Off the Top, 17
And Miles to Go Before ISleep, 25
As Good as a Rest, 35
The Books Always Balance, 42
The Boy Who Disappeared Clouds, 48
Change of Life, 56
Cleveland in My Dreams, 65
Click!, 73
Collecting Ackermans, 80
The Dangerous Business, 95
Death Wish, 100
The Dettweiler Solution, 107
Funny You Should Ask, 117
The Gentle Way, 120
Going Through the Motions, 127
Good for the Soul, 137
Hilliard’s Ceremony, 147
Hot Eyes, Cold Eyes, 164
How Would You Like It?, 170
If This Be Madness, 173
7977.FM REV TOC 7/15/02 2:31 PM Page vi
iv Contents
Leo Youngdahl, R.I.P., 177
Like a Bug on a Windshield, 182
Like a Dog in the Street, 194
The Most Unusual Snatch, 211
Nothing Short of Highway Robbery, 221
One Thousand Dollars a Word, 230
Passport in Order, 234
Someday I’ll Plant More Walnut Trees, 240
Some Days You Get the Bear, 252
Something to Remember You By, 265
Some Things a Man Must Do, 271
Sometimes They Bite, 280
Strangers on a Handball Court, 290
That Kind of a Day, 298
This Crazy Business of Ours, 305
The Tulsa Experience, 315
Weekend Guests, 324
When This Man Dies, 328
With a Smile for the Ending, 335
You Could Call It Blackmail, 350
Chip Harrison
Death of the Mallory Queen, 361
As Dark as Christmas Gets, 372
Martin Ehrengraf
The Ehrengraf Defense, 393
The Ehrengraf Presumption, 400
The Ehrengraf Experience, 409
The Ehrengraf Appointment, 420
The Ehrengraf Riposte, 432
The Ehrengraf Obligation, 442
The Ehrengraf Alternative, 451
The Ehrengraf Nostrum, 462
The Ehrengraf Affirmation, 472
The Ehrengraf Reverse, 482
7977.FM REV TOC 7/15/02 2:31 PM Page vii
Contents v
Bernie Rhodenbarr
Like a Thief in the Night, 499
The Burglar Who Dropped In on Elvis, 509
The Burglar Who Smelled Smoke, 520
Keller
Answers to Soldier, 539
Keller’s Therapy, 551
Keller on the Spot, 571
Keller’s Horoscope, 586
Keller’s Designated Hitter, 613
Keller By a Nose Extr1
Matthew Scudder
Out the Window, 633
A Candle for the Bag Lady, 657
By the Dawn’s Early Light, 679
Batman’s Helpers, 692
The Merciful Angel of Death, 703
The Night and the Music, 714
Looking for David, 716
Let’s Get Lost, 727
A Moment of Wrong Thinking, 737
New Stories
Almost Perfect, 751
Headaches and Bad Dreams, 761
Hit the Ball, Drag Fred, 776
How Far It Could Go, 788
In for a Penny, 796
Like a Bone in the Throat, 801
Points, 819
Sweet Little Hands, 829
Terrible Tommy Terhune, 837
Three in the Side Pocket, 850
You Don’t Even Feel It, 858
7977.FM REV TOC 7/15/02 2:31 PM Page viii
vi Contents
Two Old Stories
It Took You Long Enough, 873
You Can’t Lose, 878
About the Author
Books by Lawrence Block
Credits
Front Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
7977.FM REV TOC 7/15/02 2:31 PM Page ix
Introduction
“Eighty-four stories?”My friend gave me a look. “That’s not a book,” he said.
“That’s a skyscraper.”
It’s a handful, too, as you’ve no doubt already noticed yourself, and I’m con-
scious as I prepare these introductory remarks that I’m only making the damned
thing longer with every word I write. This book was very nearly entitled Long Story
Short,and it’s been observed that when you utter the words “to make a long story
short,” it’s already too late.
But I digress, and not for the first time. A short story collection seems to cry out
for an introduction, especially when it’s a huge doorstop of a thing like this one,
and especially when it represents one person’s entire output of short fiction over a
career that began in (gulp!) 1957.
Well, virtually entire...
My earliest stories, collected a few years ago in a signed limited edition (One
Night Stands, Crippen & Landru), have been purposely omitted. I don’t think
much of them—which puts me in the majority, I’d have to say—and, while I’m
not unwilling for collectors and specialists to have them, they don’t belong in this
book. (I’ve made one exception, my first published story, called “You Can’t Lose.”
It seemed worth including, if only as a curiosity.)
Two more recent shorter fictions, “Speaking of Lust” and “Speaking of Greed,”
have also been omitted. Each is the title novella in a volume of the Seven Deadly
Sins anthology series, and when all seven novellas have been written and pub-
lished, they’ll be gathered into a single volume. I’m very fond of the two written
to date—but they’re long, running around 20,000 words each, and they don’t be-
long here.
And, come to think of it, my episodic novel Hit Manis essentially a collection
of ten short stories, and that constituted a quandary all its own. If I were to include
them all, I’d be folding a full book into this one, and making people buy it a sec-
7977.FM REV TOC 7/15/02 2:31 PM Page x
viii Introduction
ond time. If I left them all out, well, I’d be passing up the chance to include one
story that was shortlisted for the Edgar Allan Poe Award and two others that won it
outright. Some authors might be modest enough to omit such stories, and even to
leave off mentioning the awards, but I am not of their number.
So I’ve compromised, and included those three of the ten, along with two more
Keller stories—“Keller’s Horoscope,” extracted from the second Keller novel, Hit
List, for publication in a German anthology, and “Keller’s Designated Hitter,”
written for an anthology of baseball stories and otherwise unpublished. If there’s a
third book about Keller, perhaps it will be included. Then again, perhaps not. At
any rate, it’s here.
Once I’d selected the stories, I had to put them in order.
As far as I can see, there are three accepted ways to organize collections of short
fiction. You can line them up in the order they were written, you can alphabetize
them by title, or you can place them here and there like paintings in a gallery, try-
ing to arrange them so that they’ll complement one another.
The last is altogether beyond me—how the hell do I know in what order you’ll
enjoy coming upon these stories? And chronological order is out the question, be-
cause I couldn’t possibly recall precisely when each story was written. Alphabeti-
cal order has always made perfect sense to me, it’s so deliciously arbitrary and yet
so marvelously unequivocal. How better to construct a sheer hodgepodge with the
illusion of order?
But there’s another variable to weigh in the balance, and that’s that some of my
stories are about series characters, and they really ought to be set off by themselves.
And I do recall the order in which the series stories were written, and they really
ought to be arranged in that order.
So here’s the plan:
The stories which appeared in my three previously published collections,
Sometimes They Bite, Like a Lamb to Slaughter,and Some Days You Get the Bear,
appear first, in one great alphabetically ordered jumble.
The groups of stories which follow—about Martin Ehrengraf, Chip Harrison,
Keller, Bernie Rhodenbarr, and Matthew Scudder—appear chronologically. Many
of these showed up in the three above-named collections, but quite a few did not,
and these are collected here for the first time: “The Ehrengraf Presumption,” “The
Ehrengraf Riposte,” “The Ehrengraf Affirmation,” and “The Ehrengraf Reverse”;
“As Dark as Christmas Gets”; “Keller’s Horoscope” and “Keller’s Designated Hit-
ter”; “The Burglar Who Smelled Smoke”; and “The Night and the Music,” “Look-
ing for David,” “Let’s Get Lost,” and “A Moment of Wrong Thinking.”
Next are twelve new non-series stories. (One of them, “It Took You Long
Enough,” was written thirty years ago and just now rediscovered.) And last and
least is an old story, indeed a first story, “You Can’t Lose,” sold to Manhuntin the
summer of 1957 and published in February 1958.
7977.FM REV TOC 7/15/02 2:31 PM Page xi
Introduction ix
And is that it?
Well, I hope not. I still get an enormous amount of satisfaction out of writing
short stories, and I still find things I haven’t done and try to work out ways to do
them.
There is one thing I’ve noticed over the years, and maybe it’s worth comment.
It is, simply, that the stories have grown longer over time. In the early days I had
to work at it to stretch a story to 3,000 words—and that was when I had every in-
centive to write long, as every word I used meant another cent and a half in my
pocket. Now, when I tend to get paid by the story rather than by the word, I have
to work even harder to hold them to two to three times that length.
(The same’s true for books, and you hear people blame computers for making
it easier to go on and on. I thought that might be it, until I wrote Tanner on Ice,
the first Tanner novel in twenty-eight years, and found it running half again as
long as its predecessors. I couldn’t blame a computer, either, as I wrote the thing
with a ballpoint pen on a stack of legal pads.)
Not long ago I read a thoughtful and perceptive introduction to a collection
called Here’s O’Hara,by Albert Erskine, John O’Hara’s longtime editor. He noted
that the more recent stories were substantially longer than the earlier ones, and
said that they were also better. He wouldn’t be foolish enough to argue that they
were better because they were longer, Erskine wrote, but thought it was fair to con-
tend that they were longer because they were better.
I know that’s true for O’Hara, and I’d like to think it’s true of my work as well.
And maybe it is, maybe I write longer these days because my characters and situ-
ations are more richly conceived, and I consequently have more to say about
them.
Or perhaps I’m just turning into a wordy old bastard. Tell you what—you
decide.
—Lawrence Block
Greenwich Village